As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe,I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens,and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.They lay mingled with other natural stones,some of which bore the marks of having been burned by Indian fires,and some by the sun,and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil.When my hoe tinkled against the stones,that music echoed to the woods and the sky,and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop.It was no longer beans that I hoed,nor I that hoed beans;and I remembered with as much pity as pride,if I remembered at all,my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons-for I sometimes made a day of it-like a mote in the eye,or in heaven's eye,falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent,torn at last to very rags and tatters,and yet a seamless cope remained;small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills,where few have found them;graceful and slender like ripples caught up from the pond,as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens;such kindredship is in nature.The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys,those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky,alternately soaring and descending,approaching and leaving one another,as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts.Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that,with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste;or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish spotted salamander,a trace of Egypt and the Nile,yet our contemporary.When I paused to lean on my hoe,these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row,a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.
On gala days the town fires its great guns,which echo like popguns to these woods,and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far.To me,away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town,the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst;and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant,I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon,as if some eruption would break out there soon,either scarlatina or canker-rash,until at length some more favorable puff of wind,making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road,brought me information of the “trainers.”It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed,and that the neighbors,according to Virgil's advice,by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils,were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again.And when the sound died quite away,and the hum had ceased,and the most favorable breezes told no tale,I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive,and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared.
I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping;and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence,and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.
When there were several bands of musicians,it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows,and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din.But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods,and the trumpet that sings of fame,and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish,-for why should we always stand for trifles?-and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon.These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine,and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon,with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm tree tops which overhang the village.This was one of the great days;though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily,and I saw no difference in it.
It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans,what with planting,and hoeing,and harvesting,and threshing,and picking over and selling them,-the last was the hardest of all,-I might add eating,for I did taste.I was determined to know beans.When they were growing,I used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon,and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs.Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds,-it will bear some iteration in the account,for there was no little iteration in the labor,-disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly,and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe,levelling whole ranks of one species,and sedulously cultivating another.That's Roman wormwood,-that's pigweed,-that's sorrel,-that's piper-grass,-have at him,chop him up,turn his roots upward to the sun,don't let him have a fibre in the shade,if you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as a leek in two days.A long war,not with cranes,but with weeds,those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side.Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe,and thin the ranks of their enemies,filling up the trenches with weedy dead.Many a lusty crest-waving Hector,that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades,fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
